Asia Online has developed the world’s first automated technology designed to translate content to a near-human publication quality in more than 500 language pair combinations. Other legacy translation technologies merely seek to provide a general understanding (gist) of the content that is translated, but they do not achieve either a publication level process or the translation quality required for publication.

An out-of-the-box solution will always fall short of quality goals. In order to deliver a high quality, a machine translation system must be customized to a specific purpose.

Translation has a lot in common with the authoring of articles for a publication where the audience, preferred vocabulary and writing style are defined. Specialists are required in order to deliver high quality articles. If you wanted to write an article on global monetary policy for Forbes magazine, for example, which one of the following specialists would you hire to write the article?

Bruno Mann, Ex-Pro Footballer

John Smith, Financial Analyst

Kerry Adams, Mechanical Engineer

You would of course choose option B, John Smith, because as a Financial Analyst he has the necessary background skills in the banking and finance domain. If you were to then have the same article translated into Simplified Chinese, which one of the following translators would you hire?

Brenda Jones, British, Studying Chinese History

John Smith, American, Financial Analyst, Learning Chinese

Faye Wong, Chinese, Graduated Business &      Finance at Harvard

All of the above individuals can write and translate, but only through specialization, a vastly higher quality will be achieved. Option C, Faye Wong, is a native Chinese speaker who has business and finance expertise from studying in America (giving her a stronger level of English than someone who studied English in China), so will write more natural sounding Chinese than Brenda Jones and John Smith who are non-native Chinese speakers.

For the same reasons that you would use specialists to author and translate a high-quality article, machine translation must be customized and specialized for a purpose. It is essential that target audience, vocabulary and writing style are taken into account – as in above examples, only where there is specialization can high quality be achieved.

The examples below show an original sentence translated from Spanish into English that is targeted towards two different audiences – business readers and children. Even though the sentence meaning is the same, the writing style and vocabulary is very different.

Depending on purpose and data availability, different type of customization can be applied to Language Studio™ machine translation engines.

Currently, machine translation fits many, but not all scenarios. There is a one-time costs associated with customization of Language Studio™ and either a licensing cost or a fee based on the amount of content translated using our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform.

As high-quality translation requires customization, there must be a sufficient volume of content that is needed to be translated in order to justify the cost of customization. For small or one time translation jobs, it may be more cost effective to use only human translators.

To determine the economic viability of using a custom translation engine for a project, a calculation of the overall project cost using human translators can be compared to the customization cost plus the license of SaaS fees using Language Studio™.

A human can translated between 2,000-3,000 words per day. A machine can translate hundreds of millions of words per day. Speed can often be a factor in deciding whether or not to use machine translation.

Language Studio™ technology is currently most suitable for mid to large size or repetitive translation projects. Human translators are a limited resource and work on a fixed cost basis. Language Studio is a scalable resource and costs are lowered based on word volume. Language Studio™ delivers more consistent style than multiple humans with different styles.

Costs for human translation typically vary depending on language and domain from US$0.07 to US$0.50 per word. Asia Online has the same per-word fee irrespective of language or domain. Discounts are given based on word volume with pricing for larger volumes as low as a fraction of a cent per word.

Human only translation can be time consuming and costly. Many translation projects are not justifiable in terms of cost or practical from a time perspective with a human only approach.

The real-world example to the right shows a business case that was rejected by an Asia Online customer’s management team as not being cost viable with a human only approach.

Asia Online partners with Language Service Providers to provide human translation services so that a combination of human and machine can be used to deliver a high quality translation project.

After analyzing the content to be translated, it was found that only a small amount required human only translation, the remainder of the content could be machine translated and then human edited at a lower cost or even machine translated without any human editing at all. Taking this combined approach reduced the cost of the project from $22 million down to $4 million, a saving of 81.82% over the human only approach. This project was subsequently approved as the customer’s management could justify the cost.

In many cases, machine translation can be combined with human translation and human proof reading. Different types of content have different quality and volume requirements. The scenarios below provide some examples of how different types of translation could be applied for different purposes and goals.

Content needs to be translated into 5 languages. The company has a large knowledge base and user forums which contain a lot of information.

Surveys are produced, and the initial survey form must be perfectly translated into multiple languages. Languages vary depending on the survey client. The responses to the surveys need to be translated back into English so that they can be analyzed as one body of information. New surveys are created on a regular basis and future surveys can reuse the same customized translation engine. A typical survey would is profiled below.

Hotel customers post their feedback about each hotel that they visit. As the audience members are from many countries, it is important that the content is available in many languages. Translation of reviews increases the amount of content available in each language.

Reports are published based on the research of consumer products and product market data. Customers require high quality for important topics. Less important topics can be made available without proof reading, but with the option to have the research proof read for a fee by clicking on a button within the page.

Content originally authored in Simplified Chinese needs to be translated into English. The main course documentation needs to be high quality, but supporting articles and news clippings can be made available as machine translations.

Company Reports are received daily from around the world in many languages. The reports are converted to English and are made available in a research database.